Researching Jean-jacques Rousseau

His Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract are cornerstones in modern political and social thought. Rousseau's sentimental novel Julie, or the New Heloise (1761) was important to the development of preromanticism and romanticism in fiction. His Emile, or On Education (1762) is an educational treatise on the place of the individual in society. Rousseau's autobiographical writings—the posthumously published Confessions (composed in 1769), which initiated the modern autobiography, and the unfinished Reveries of the Solitary Walker (composed 1776–1778)—exemplified the late 18th-century "Age of Sensibility", and featured an increased focus on subjectivity and introspection that later characterized modern writing.

Rousseau befriended fellow philosopher Denis Diderot in 1742, and would later write about Diderot's romantic troubles in his Confessions. During the period of the French Revolution, Rousseau was the most popular of the philosophers among members of the Jacobin Club. He was interred as a national hero in the Panthéon in Paris, in 1794, 16 years after his death.

His life was supposed to be the subject of a Yann Moix film, called Palme d'or, starring Benoît Poelvoorde. The project was not filmed. Moix did make, without Poelvoorde, the disastrous . Frédéric Sojcher's film, also known as Born to Film, was selected and shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004, is dedicated to Rousseau's work as well as Max Naveaux's and Jacques Hardy's. It stars the actors Bouli Lanners and Benoît Poelvoorde.

Rousseau's first few films were fairly conventional examples of the fantasy genre. However, some of them won regional awards in the 1970s (people's choice, best screenplay). A semi-permanent lack of financial resources prevented him from making technically accomplished films. However, he financed, edited, directed and acted in most of them. He was also known for carrying a gun on set and sometimes firing it to get the actors' attention.

Having a fertile imagination fueled by esoteric tastes in books, his films shunned the mainstream more and more, thus becoming marginalized. He never received subsidies to finance his films. Patrick Moriau, a Belgian politician, stated once that "If one asked me to allocate part of the Walloon Community's finances to the Committee for Film Selection, the money would undoubtedly never go into Rousseau's pockets. He may be a kind man, but his films are frankly wild and scare people."

On the evening of July 15, 2014 after an altercation outside a café between two men, he was run over by a car driven by one of the men and remained in a coma until his death later that year on November 5.